Homeland

What does a terrorist look like?

Is Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody a patriot or a terrorist? This is the main question posed by the new Showtime series Homeland.
Along the way, it asks a lot of other, more important questions. What
are our criteria for deciding? What does a terrorist look like? How do
terrorists behave? Need they follow radical religious leaders or is it
suspicious enough that a man — devoted to country, red-haired,
lilly-white, not religious — would disappear behind enemy lines for 8
years, only to return an observant Muslim?

Claire Danes plays a CIA officer named Carrie Mathison who
spent five years in Iraq and is now “in the penalty box” as an analyst
with homeland security after being caught inside an Iraqi jail
extracting intel from a man who was about to be executed. The intel she
gets: “An American prisoner of war has been turned.”

This means very little to Mathison until Brody (played
brilliantly by Damian Lewis) is found, alive, under suspicious
circumstances. Her bosses at Langley want Brody as a propaganda piece,
and she doesn’t have the clout to surveil him legally, so she does it
illegally.

Last week’s episode exposed a hole in Mathison’s
surveillance (Brody’s garage), and contained a scene where Brody
wandered around a hardware store for a day, flipping switches and
examining parts. He came home with a rug and, the next morning, in the
garage, secretly, he faced east and knelt to pray.

Again we ask: does conversion to Islam make Brody a
terrorist? Does hiding the fact? Or is Sgt. Brody just aware of how such
a conversion will look?

Making the lens through which we view Brody an
intelligence savant like Mathison — who battles an unspecified illness
ranging from extreme anxiety to schizophrenia — forces us to question
our own reactions to Brody.

Are we witnessing the groundwork of a double agent and a
terrorist, or a man who just wants to get his life back and can’t figure
out how? More importantly, is our national obsession with security a
normal reaction to what we’ve been through, or the very definition of
insanity?

These questions needn’t be answered in the show. They’re
best left to each viewer. The fact that they’re being asked at all makes
Homeland a thriller in the best, most thoughtful sense —the kind where as much turmoil happens in your gut as onscreen. (Showtime, Sundays, 10pm)

TIVO-WORTHY

Austin City Limits

PBS began airing just about 41 years ago. For 34 of those years (37 seasons), Austin City Limits
has been giving musically-inclined white shut-ins something to do on
Saturday evenings. This week, Widespread Panic — the 25-year-old jam
band — performs, completing the century. (KSPS, Saturday, 11pm; KCDT,
Saturday, 10pm)

Walking Dead

The AMC zombie drama returns with 90 minute 2nd season
premiere. If that’s not enough didactic emotion and gore, stick around
for another hour of people talking about the first ninety minutes. That
show’s called Talking Dead. Genius. (AMC, Sunday, 9 pm)

MLB World Series Game 1

Four teams remain in the hunt for the World Series:
Milwaukee and St. Louis in the National league and Detroit and Texas in
the American. If St. Louis and Detroit square off against each other it
will pit two of the most storied teams in baseball (it will also be a
rematch of the 2006 series). If it’s Milwaukee vs Texas, it will mark
the first time — ever — a team from the original 1903 league
doesn’t make the series. If it’s any other combination, Joe Buck will
have way less to talk about. (FOX, Weds, 7:30 pm)